The Rolling Stones have delved into their vaults for an expanded reissue of the 1971 classic Sticky Fingers that boasts unreleased studio outtakes and live performances in addition to freshly remastered sound. It’s due on May 26.

Announced in conjunction with the band’s summer North American tour, the Sticky Fingers reissue will be available in a variety of physical and digital configurations, from a straight remaster with no bonus material to a super deluxe edition box that adds a separate disc of unreleased alternate takes and live performances, another CD containing the live Get Yer Leeds Lungs Out! recordings from March 1971, a DVD featuring two songs from the band’s Marquee Club set on March 26, 1971, and a 7” vinyl disc with “Brown Sugar” and “Wild Horses.”

The super deluxe box also contains a number of non-musical goodies, including a poster, a cutout of the band and a 120-page limited edition book compiling essays about (and previously unpublished photos from) the making of the album.

According to the press release announcing the reissue, some of the previously unreleased material fans can expect includes an alternative version of “Brown Sugar” featuring Eric Clapton as well as unreleased takes of “Bitch,” “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking” and “Dead Flowers,” an acoustic version of “Wild Horses,” and five tracks recorded during a gig at the Roundhouse in London in 1971, including “Honky Tonk Women” and “Midnight Rambler.”

Sticky Fingers becomes the latest in a series of classic Stones records to enjoy the deluxe reissue treatment, following Exile on Main Street in 2010 and Some Girls a year later. Pre-orders are available now via the band’s official website.

Metallica songs have been covered by countless artists in just about every genre imaginable. Now, the band’s iconic single “Enter Sandman” has been given a twangy makeover by Banjo Guy Ollie that you can check out above.

In addition to playing his namesake instrument, Banjo Guy Ollie does some serious mandolin shredding on the song, as well. You can find out more about Ollie and his other musical endeavors on his Facebook page.

Banjo Guy Ollie isn’t the only artists to recently cover a Metallica track. The Harp Twins have released an ethereal harp cover of the band’s “The Unforgiven.” The identical twins have released an album covering rock and metal songs, titled Harp Attack, which you can download here.

If medieval folk music versions of Metallica is your genre of choice, you’ll definitely want to watch the band Stary Olsa from Belarus play “One.”

The Rolling Stones will be back on the road — and back in the United States — this summer.

The band has announced a 15-city stadium trek it’s dubbing the ZIP Code Tour, promising “a set packed full of classic Stones hits,” set to begin May 24 in San Diego and continue through July 15 in Quebec. Tickets are scheduled to go on sale April 13, with a special pre-sale for American Express members on April 8; more ticketing information will be made available at the band’s website.

“We are excited to be back in North America playing stadiums this summer,” enthused Mick Jagger in a press release announcing the tour. “We are looking forward to being back onstage and playing your favorite songs.” Adds Keith Richards, “We love being out on the road and it is great to come back to North America! I can’t wait to get back on the stage!”

The summer dates, which mark the band’s first extended U.S. tour since its road run in support of A Bigger Bang a decade ago, will be accompanied by the May 26 reissue of their classic 1971 album Sticky Fingers, expanded with “sought after” studio outtakes and live performances that “have never been available until this release.” News of the reissue, which will be available in several formats as well as standard and deluxe editions, follows rumors that the Stones would be playing the album in its entirety during the shows.

David Lee Roth started Van Halen‘s performance on Jimmy Kimmel Live! yesterday with some new hair on his recently shorn head, and finished it with a new bandage on his face.

The band, on hand to play a few of its classic cuts for a special appearance scheduled to play out over two Kimmel episodes (one aired last night, the other will be shown tonight), had to halt its first attempt at “Panama” when Roth cut himself in the face with a microphone, pausing the show until he was bandaged up and ready to rock again. “I f—ed my nose up with the microphone here,” Roth told the crowd, as you can see above. “So we’re gonna start the whole thing over, and give you a little extra for your patience.”

Fortunately, Roth’s injury didn’t put much of a damper on the proceedings — he’s been here before, after all, having broken his nose on tour 35 years ago — and the band got things back on track for live renditions of “Panama” (which you can watch below) and “Runnin’ With the Devil,” which you can check out below:

As previously reported, the Kimmel set is one of two special television appearances the band has scheduled around today’s release of its new Tokyo Dome Live in Concert double album, and in advance of the lengthy tour announced for the summer and fall. The group has also launched a reissue campaign for its first six albums, starting with Van Halen and 1984, which arrive alongside Tokyo Dome, and continuing later this year with Van Halen II, Diver Down, Fair Warning, and Women and Children First.

AC/DC offer fans a glimpse of what goes into the making of a music video with this brief compilation of behind-the-scenes footage from their new clip for “Rock the Blues Away.”

Singer Brian Johnson shares his enthusiasm for the song in the opening moments of the video, which you can watch above. “It didn’t come to us immediately,” he admits. “It’s just — I started singing it after I listened to the album. It just kept popping up in me head, and it’s a brilliant track. I like the sentiment: ‘You’ve gotta rock the blues away.’”

Director David Mallet adds that his goal was to offer viewers “a totally different feel to AC/DC,” and he says he went about that in a few ways — including filming the band in a “really small, funky, scuzzy club,” as well as inviting in a crowd of Los Angeles-based fans who “look totally different” from the crowds usually glimpsed in the videos the band films in Europe. Finally, Mallet says he wanted to give the audience a taste of the work that has to be done before the lights go up — “rehearsals, still sessions, etc., etc., for the upcoming tour.”

The video goes on to do just that, sprinkling in bits of the band goofing around between shots of the crew setting up and the audience arriving for the video. Check out the complete video above, complete with testimonials from some of the fans on hand for the shoot, and then watch the “Rock the Blues Away” video.

Robert Plant‘s perpetual musical restlessness is one of the reasons why his solo career has been so fascinating, particularly in recent years. It seems that his next stop might be towards the world of electronic dance music (EDM), with Diplo as his personal guide.

According to Consequence of Sound, the popular DJ-producer posted a selfie of the two of them to his Instagram account over the weekend, complete with the message “Collab coming soon.” Sadly, that’s all the details we have for you right now.

Plant, meanwhile, has a busy schedule ahead of him. He’s got a four-song live EP, More Roar, coming up for Record Store Day on April 18. A week later, he’ll perform at the Kennedy Center with Alison Krauss as part of a tribute to Lead Belly. Then, in late May, he will embark on a three-week tour of North American tour that will include a slot at the closing night of Bonnaroo on June 14.

Diplo, whose real name is Thomas Wesley Pentz, is currently one of the most in-demand producers in EDM right now. Over the past five years, he’s produced or remixed songs by such big names as Justin Bieber, Madonna, Bruno Mars, M.I.A., Chris Brown, Beyonce and Usher. He was nominated for a Grammy for Best Non-Classical Producer in 2013.

The Who have started other tours believing they were bidding farewell to the road, but Roger Daltrey knows the group’s 50th anniversary dates are definitely the “last big tour we’ll ever do.”

“We have to be realistic,” Daltrey told Rolling Stone. “I want us to stop at the top of our game when we are still really good at what we do. The quality of the music is really what this is all about.”

That said, Daltrey argued that the current incarnation of the Who is “amazing” in concert. “There’s something about old rock musicians with good music. It just gets better,” he continued. “Maturity brings something extra to it. What it loses in the youthful exuberance, it makes up with the scars of age.”

And although the singer maintains that his vocal cords are “better now than they’ve ever been,” he added that there’s something satisfying about taking a victory lap while he’s still in command of his instrument: “There’s something about looking down the end of a telescope and seeing a potential end. It brings me more joy when I sing the songs because it might be the last time. I’ve always tried to sing as though I’m singing a song for the first time, now I sing it as though I’m singing the song for what might be the last time.”

Admitting that life on the road isn’t quite as easy to cope with physically as it was in his youth, Daltrey also laughingly pointed out that while he does feel 71, “If I shut my eyes, I’m 21. I try and avoid the mirror.”

All of which adds up to a lengthy series of dates during which Daltrey says he’s enjoying engaging with the audience while truly appreciating how far the Who have come over the past five decades. “Obviously, I hope I’m wiser. I hope I’m less arrogant. Of course, you feel different, but life is a joy,” mused Daltrey. “I’m very aware that I’ve had a life of privilege thanks to the music business and the support of our audience. I’m very aware of that.”

Kiss co-founder Gene Simmons has announced his involvement in a new film company, Erebus Pictures, that’s partnering with WWE Studios to produce horror movies under a three-picture co-production deal.

Billboard broke the news of the deal, quoting Simmons as saying, “The horror genre continues to fascinate me as it proves to be endlessly thrilling and engaging for audiences.”

The Erebus/WWE partnership is scheduled to make its debut with Temple, the tale of “a team of operatives trapped inside an isolated military compound after its artificial intelligence shuts down. While investigating the source of the malfunction, the crew experiences strange phenomena as they attempt to uncover who or what killed the team previously stationed at the compound.”

As the report notes, Simmons’ Erebus venture comes on the heels of his production investment in the upcoming Kiss documentary You Wanted the Best, You Got the Best, planned for release later this year. As fans of the band are well aware, Simmons has had an interest in filmmaking for quite some time; his Hollywood ambitions were even once a major sticking point for his partner Paul Stanley, who admitted to feeling like he’d been left with the heavy lifting in the group during a portion of the ’80s.

“I felt abandoned,” Stanley wrote in his Face the Music memoir regarding the sessions for 1984′s Animalize. “After informing me without any warning or discussion that he wouldn’t be around for the album, Gene went into a studio and crapped out some demos as fast as he could. Then he was off to do a movie [the Tom Selleck-starring Runaway]. He left me with a pile of mostly unusable junk.”

These days, Simmons and Stanley seem far more adept at dividing their time between Kiss and their various other business ventures, so fans probably don’t need to worry about that old creative tug-of-war starting up again. In the meantime, although Billboard‘s report doesn’t mention a release date for Temple, it does note that production is scheduled to get underway this summer, with a director to be hired “shortly.”

Not too many bands enjoy the greatest success of their career with their ninth studio album — but that’s precisely what Germany’s Scorpions did when Love at First Sting arrived in record stores in March 1984.

For almost 20 years, the resilient quintet from Hanover had patiently bided its time on the fringes of America’s musical conscience, painstakingly building a highly respectable career across the pond throughout the ’70s until musical trends started coming around to the band’s increasingly commercial sound at the start of the ’80s.

Now, a perfect storm was brewing that would finally bring hard rock and metal to the global masses, and the Scorpions (along with fellow European veterans like Judas Priest and younger upstarts like Iron Maiden and Def Leppard) were ready to reap the rewards like a finely tuned machine. Perhaps “the ultimate metal machine,” to borrow a slogan from another well-known German brand.

In all seriousness, though, the best thing about the Scorpions’ ascension was that they hardly needed to alter their sound to achieve it — merely make a few cosmetic improvements to Rudolf Schenker’s already highly focused songwriting (as heard on 1982’s hit-laden Blackout LP), because the last vestiges of their outdated ‘60s and ‘70s influences had wisely been jettisoned years earlier, in tandem with original guitar wizard, Uli Jon Roth.

Simply put, the band knew exactly what they had to deliver, musically speaking, when they started work on Love at First Sting with the help of longtime producer Dieter Dirks, and the results immediate spoke for themselves. In “Rock You Like a Hurricane,” the band concocted their ultimate hard rock hit (No. 25 in the U.S.); in “Big City Nights” an even catchier follow-up, tailor-made for the arenas they’d soon be packing; and in “Still Loving You,” the perfect tear-jerking ballad to win over female fans in droves.

Just as importantly, at a time when consumers still expected a full-length album experience, Love at First Sting was remarkably deep with quality material, including tone setting rocker “Bad Boys Running Wild,” the impressively hooky “I’m Leaving You,” the thought-provoking “Crossfire” and the ultra-heavy “Coming Home,” which certainly appealed to the band’s all-important core heavy metal audience.

Together, these songs pushed Love at First Sting to No. 6 on the Billboard chart and toward multi-platinum sales across the globe (with support from the largest tour of the Scorpions career) — even though its iconic, erotic cover image (snapped by noted German fashion photographer Helmut Newton) not surprisingly offended some American sensibilities and forced an alternate photo to be shipped to some retailers.

None of this could forestall the Scorpions’ triumph, however; the persistent “Teutonic Terrors” had clearly won the marathon. And they did so in a year that would also prove quite memorable for heavy metal’s next generation of “sprinters”: bands like Motley Crue and Ratt (whose Out of the Cellar was released on the very same day as ‘Love at First Sting’) that were following in the older band’s inspiring footsteps to win some gold and platinum “medals” of their own in this nascent “age of metal.”

After years of delay, on March 27, 1979, Eric Clapton finally married Pattie Boyd, the ex-wife of his friend George Harrison and the inspiration for the songs “Something,” “Layla” and “Wonderful Tonight.”

Clapton and Harrison became close friends in the ’60s, at which time Clapton became infatuated with Boyd, who continually rebuffed his advances. But Clapton remained deeply in love with her. Many of the songs on Derek and the Dominos‘ 1970 album Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs – especially the scorching title track — were thinly veiled autobiographical accounts of his feelings for her. Unfortunately, the album didn’t have the effect Clapton intended, and he fell into a three-year, heroin-induced isolation.

By 1974 — right around the time Clapton was kicking heroin — Harrison and Boyd were splitting up, and, with Harrison’s blessing, she ran into Clapton’s arms. Five years later, they tied the knot.

Two months into the marriage, the newlyweds held a reception for their friends in Clapton’s garden (the same place where Harrison wrote “Here Comes the Sun”). In attendance were Harrison, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr. An impromptu jam session among the guests started, which was the closest there had been to a Beatles reunion until the Anthology project in the mid-’90s. John Lennon was not invited to the party due to his long-running immigration issues.

For all the two went through, the marriage didn’t last long. Clapton’s drinking problem and infidelity caused them to separate in 1984, with the divorce coming in 1988. She wrote about her marriages to both men in her 2007 memoir Wonderful Tonight: George Harrison, Eric Clapton, and Me.

It’s been nearly a decade since the Who released their most recent LP, 2006′s Endless Wire, and it still looks like it’ll be a while before fans hear another new album from Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey.

Daltrey offered hope, however, during a recent interview with Rolling Stone. Looking out beyond the Who’s 50th anniversary tour, which he and Townshend have predicted will be their last of this size, Daltrey mused, “I also know that Pete wants to make another record. He’s just talking about it. I’ve heard a couple of tracks, which are great.”

Any new music would be the product of a deepened bond between the duo, whose occasionally cantankerous relationship has mellowed over time. “After all the testosterone of youth, all of the problems and middle age and drugs and losing people we love, in the end you suddenly realize you deeply love each other,” pointed out Daltrey. “We are like brothers. Family is like that, aren’t they? One minute you love them, the next minute you can’t stand them. But as soon as it looks like they’re not going to be around, they’re knocking on the door.”

And even though major tours are off the table for the Who in the future, Daltrey isn’t willing to rule out live performances in general. “This bit of our career is closed, but maybe two more doors open up. Pete is an incredibly vibrant musician. I could see us playing acoustically in some ways,” he said about an unplugged theater tour. “Then you don’t have to tour. You just get down in New York for a couple of weeks. That’s not touring. It’s a piece of cake. You go home every night. It would be civilized.”

Ozzy Osbourne‘s Ozzfiesta event, previously planned for May 27-31 at the Hard Rock Hotel in Riviera Maya, Mexico, has been canceled for medical reasons.

Ozzfiesta promoter Cool Breeze Concerts broke the bad news on the event’s website, publishing an update that begins, “Like you, we were very excited about the event. However, Ozzy is having surgery, scheduled for May, following his South American tour. He requires at least four weeks of recovery time. We are very disappointed that we need to cancel.”

Cool Breeze is offering refunds to those who want to opt out of a visit, but the announcement adds, “If you decide that you would still enjoy an all inclusive vacation at the Hard Rock, Riviera Maya, Mexico, please send us an email, and we can make the arrangements. We apologize for any inconvenience and hope that you understand the circumstances surrounding the cancellation.”

The lack of specific information is worrisome for Osbourne’s fans, who are left hoping he isn’t facing any serious health woes — or that the timing of his surgery isn’t a cover for poor ticket sales. In the meantime, Osbourne is still scheduled to travel to South America in April as part of this year’s Monsters of Rock festival, and will join Black Sabbath for some fall Japanese dates that have been referred to as the band’s “farewell.” The group is also at work on its follow-up to 2013′s 13 album, which it’s said will be the last.

Bob Dylan went electric in 1965, musically speaking, but four out of the five Rolling Stones really did go electric with shocking accidents that happened the same year.

The first incident occurred on March 26, just as the Stones were beginning their first tour of Scandinavia. Rolling along on the success of the No. 1 U.K. single “The Last Time,” its most successful band-written tune to date, the quintet had shows planned in Odense and Copenhagen in Denmark, then in Gothenburg and Stockholm in Sweden. It turned out that Stones bassist Bill Wyman was fortunate to live to perform at any of those shows.

That’s because he was knocked unconscious by way of a 220-volt electric shock. He wasn’t the only Stone to ride the lightning that day. Details are sparse, but the accident happened during a rehearsal at the Fyens Forum in Odense (and not an actual concert, as is sometimes reported). Either because of a faulty microphone, or because Mick Jagger touched two live mics simultaneously, the frontman received an electric shock that spun him around the stage, and into Brian Jones. The guitarist, now shocked via Jagger, then backed into Wyman, who fell down, unconscious, onstage.

The bassist eventually came to, although pictures exist of Wyman on the floor and Jagger and Charlie Watts looking quite grave about the situation. The show’s promoter would later explain that Wyman was saved by happenstance when Jagger accidentally pulled out the main plug while reeling from the shock. Wyman, Jagger and Jones recovered to play every show on the tour.

The paper refers to the purchase as a “top-secret sale” and says confirmation was obtained through a land title search; the realtor involved in the deal, Noel Nicholson, declined to share specifics, although he did say the sale was in the $10 million range.

While Young is reportedly moving into his new home, his bandmates are preparing to embark on their world tour in support of last year’s Rock or Bust LP. They’ll play their first dates in Europe, starting in Holland on May 5, then travel to North America for a 13-show leg that’s scheduled to begin Aug. 22 in Foxborough, Mass. As on the album, Young’s position will be filled by his nephew Stevie; he’s joined in his absence by drummer Phil Rudd, whose legal troubles created a vacancy filled by the returning Chris Slade.

Meanwhile, the promotional campaign in support of Rock or Bust continues: The album debuted at No. 3 in its first week on the charts, and has spun off three singles in the Top 20 rock hits “Play Ball” and the title track, as well as the more recently released “Rock the Blues Away.”

Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee got a little too cheeky with the local authorities during the band’s stop in Augusta, Ga. on March 25, 1990, and ended up at the police station after pulling off his part in what was probably one of the weirder publicity stunts in Crüe history.

As Crüe fans are aware, Lee had a reputation for mooning the crowd at concerts. The band, then on tour behind their massively successful Dr. Feelgood LP, didn’t need any extra attention from the press, but according to a police officer who was working vice and narcotics for the city at the time, they went out of their way to determine whether his stunt would have any legal repercussions in Augusta.

“Crüe’s manager came to me before the show and actually asked me what the ramifications would be if Lee ‘mooned’ the audience,” Sgt. Dave Bourbo told the Augusta Chronicle in 2010. “I told them that Augusta had a new local ordinance that prohibited that behavior and if anyone did that it would result in a small fine. The manager smiled at me and left.”

Knowing they wouldn’t get into any serious trouble, and always willing to shore up their reputation for bad behavior, the band gave that night’s crowd a little extra spectacle. In an incident that made national news, Lee was reportedly charged with indecent exposure and performing a sexually explicit act after mooning the crowd — and for the kids in the crowd, it looked like a genuine conflict between the Crüe and the police.

Remembering that Lee “ran off the stage wearing only a g-string” after mooning the audience, attendee Trey Simmons told the Chronicle, “The rest of the band seemed to act as if they didn’t know what was going on. Vince Neil and Mick Mars came back to the stage, and Mick was still playing his guitar, unaware that his drummer was gone. The floor lights came on right as Neil made some derogatory comments about Augusta’s police department.”

According to Bourbo, however, the entire thing was essentially staged. “We didn’t really arrest him. He followed us down to [the station], and he signed the citation and paid his fine,” he laughed. “He could not have been a nicer guy, and the entire group was extremely cordial and even thanked us for doing our jobs.”

Most newlyweds like to spend their first few days as a couple far away from their hometown in some exotic locale, isolated from the rest of the world. Then again, most couples weren’t John Lennon and Yoko Ono, whose honeymoon was a week-long “Bed-In for Peace” that began on March 25, 1969.

Following their wedding five days earlier, John and Yoko holed up in the presidential suite at the Hilton Amsterdam, which they had decorated with hand-drawn signs above their bed reading “Hair Peace” and “Bed Peace.” They invited the global press into their room to discuss peace for 12 hours every day.

“We sent out a card: ‘Come to John and Yoko’s honeymoon: a bed-in, Amsterdam Hotel,’” Lennon said in Anthology. “You should have seen the faces on the reporters and the cameramen fighting their way through the door! Because whatever it is, is in people’s minds – their minds were full of what they thought was going to happen. They fought their way in, and their faces dropped.

“There were we like two angels in bed, with flowers all around us, and peace and love on our heads,” he continued. “We were fully clothed; the bed was just an accessory. We were wearing pyjamas, but they don’t look much different from day clothes — nothing showing.”

Their choice of city to stage their event and get their message across was not random. As Ono said to a reporter, ”We thought that Amsterdam was a very important place to do it, because it has a very fresh and alive interest. And we’re thinking that, instead of going out and fight and make war or something like that, we should just stay in bed — everybody should just stay in bed and enjoy the spring.”

“It’s a beautiful place,” Lennon told the Dutch press. “And Amsterdam is a place where a lot of things happen with the youth … The more peaceful are the ideas that the youth have, and if we have any influence on youth at all, we’d like to influence them in a peaceful way.”

While the idea of sitting in bed for a week and letting your hair grow for peace remains undoubtedly silly, the couple admitted the absurdity was part of the plan. “A little old lady from Wigan or Hull wrote to the Daily Mirror asking if they could put Yoko and myself on the front page more often,” Lennon said in Anthology. “She said she hadn’t laughed so much for ages. That’s great, that’s what we wanted.”

The suite where Lennon and Ono staged the bed-in is now marketed as the John and Yoko Suite, and decorated with memorabilia. It can be rented for roughly $2,400 a night.

Two months later, Lennon and Ono staged a second bed-in at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal. They recorded “Give Peace a Chance” with a handful of invited guests. Several years ago, Ono released their footage of both bed-ins as a 70-minute documentary called Bed Peace, which you can watch above.

Lynyrd Skynyrd were a band on the rise when they returned to record stores with their third LP, Nuthin’ Fancy — but they were also headed for a period of extreme turbulence.

The trouble actually started while they were still in the studio working on Fancy, which arrived in stores in March 1975. Signed and discovered by Al Kooper, who’d produced their first two albums for his Sounds of the South label, the band chafed under Kooper’s direction during the Fancy sessions, and ultimately decided to part ways after the record wrapped.

“He tried to tell us what to do, but we wouldn’t let him,” guitarist Allen Collins told Crawdaddy! in the summer of 1975. “He once brought up this idea to do a Grand Funk-like song. We said we didn’t do that s—. There’s good and bad parts to everybody. I’m not saying anything against him, but we ain’t gonna use him anymore.”

The Nuthin’ Fancy mix proved a particular sticking point for the band, who elected guitarist Ed King to undo Kooper’s work. But King was having his own issues with Skynyrd — as was drummer Bob Burns, who left the lineup weeks prior to the group returning to the studio to work on the LP. New drummer Artimus Pyle entered the ranks just in time to join them for the quick 17-day recording process that produced the album — and just a few months before King walked out in the middle of the tour, partly prompted by changes that started taking place after manager Peter Rudge took over in Kooper’s absence.

“Ronnie was drinking a lot. It was just an unpleasant situation,” King later told Classic Bands. “I never drank, but I was into drugs pretty good. I had gotten fed up with frankly all the violence. Our new manager used to tell [singer] Ronnie [Van Zant], ‘Hey, the crazier you are, the better you’re gonna be.’ And I think he kind of took it to heart. It just got a little too nutty for me. So, in the middle of the night, I just walked out.”

In the midst of all this chaos, Lynyrd Skynyrd delivered a remarkably strong set of songs. Nuthin’ Fancy became their first album to break the Billboard Top 10, peaking at No. 9 on the Top 200 Albums chart and bringing them a Top 40 single with the No. 27 hit “Saturday Night Special.”

Summing up the depth and breadth of Skynyrd’s music in five minutes, “Special” followed the same rough outline that any casual listener would have expected from the band, with its riff-heavy three-guitar attack bolstering Van Zant’s distinctive southern howl. But lyrically, it’s far more than just a stereotypical redneck rocker, with verse after verse describing the ruin wrought by the impulsive violence enabled by cheap handguns that “Ain’t no good for nothin’ / But put a man six feet in a hole” and asking, “Why don’t we dump ‘em, people / To the bottom of the sea.”

“Saturday Night Special” still remains a sticking point for gun enthusiasts who continue to accuse the band of selling out — or those who see Skynyrd’s tangled relationship with the Confederate flag as an example of how they’re willing to pander to the God-and-guns crowd just as quickly as they’ll talk down to them. But Van Zant, who co-wrote the track with King, never shied away from speaking to his own experiences in song, presenting a picture of Southern life that was more varied and complex than any stereotype.

“I think of the group as a team,” explained guitarist Gary Rossington. “Ronnie, Ed, Allen and myself are the basic core of the band. If I quit, it wouldn’t hurt that much. Same with Al and Ed. But if Ronnie quit, it would fall apart – he holds everything together. I think he’s one of the best writers in America. He just writes true stories. Decisions are made jointly by the four of us, but he has always made the final decision ’cause he was a little older and smarter than the rest of us.”

“We went in there and they said, ‘Don’t you know the bass and drums are supposed to play together?’ We didn’t even know how to count time to songs – we had just two speeds: slow and fast,” Van Zant admitted of the band’s early ’70s Muscle Shoals sessions, which would eventually see release as Skynyrd’s First and … Last in 1978. “I don’t understand this phrase ‘I’ve paid my dues.’ We didn’t have any money and lived on peanut butter and jelly, and I loved it. I don’t regret any of it. We never expected to make it this far, but we worked hard to get here. The money doesn’t mean s— – I really don’t care about it at all.”

As Nuthin’ Fancy soared up the charts, Skynyrd’s image — and its internal band dynamic — may have been clouded by booze, violence and music business politics, but Van Zant insisted that underneath it all, it was still all about honest rock ‘n’ roll. “All I’m concerned with is the chance to play concerts like we’re doin’ now. We could even stand to come down a few notches – I’d like to see everybody who wants to see us get in,” he continued. “I don’t care what the promoter says, I don’t care what the writers say, I just care about those people out there who paid to see us.”

Sadly, a horrific plane crash changed Lynyrd Skynyrd forever in a couple years, when Van Zant, guitarist Steve Gaines and vocalist Cassie Gaines, as well as assistant road manager Dean Kilpatrick, pilot Walter McCreary and co-pilot William Gray were killed on impact. But on their occasionally rocky road to the top, the band remained a brotherhood in spite of any defections or disagreements.

“We haven’t changed, even though some people’s attitudes have changed towards us,” Rossington vowed, although he did admit that the band’s heavy touring schedule wasn’t always as much fun as it might appear from the outside. “We’d like to start writing a lot more and touring less. For four years we’ve been constantly on the road, never at home.”

See Lynyrd Skynyrd and Other Rockers in the Top 100 Albums of the ’70s

The clip, which you can listen to above, excerpts roughly a minute and a half from the Tokyo Dome version of “I’m the One.” Like the other 22 performances collected on the new double-disc set, it was recorded June 21, 2013, during the Tokyo stop on the band’s tour in support of its 2012 reunion album with original singer David Lee Roth, A Different Kind of Truth.

Billed as the band’s “definitive live album,” Dome is Van Halen’s second concert release, but the first to be culled from dates with Roth in the lineup; their previous stage recording, 1993′s Live: Right Here, Right Now, was compiled during Sammy Hagar‘s tenure. (Meanwhile, a number of archival shows from the band’s early years remain tantalizingly unreleased.)

As previously reported, Tokyo Dome is scheduled to arrive alongside the first in a series of new remasters from the Van Halen vaults, starting with 1984 and Van Halen and continuing later this year with Van Halen II, Diver Down, Fair Warning and Women and Children First. A “greatest hits” tour has also been rumored for 2015, but no dates have been officially announced.

The “I’m the One” clip follows a series of other Tokyo Dome previews, including “Unchained,” “Panama” and “Runnin’ With the Devil,” which you can check out below.

Questions about whether Twisted Sister would break up following the death on Friday (March 20) of drummer AJ Pero were more or less answered by Dee Snider. Calling him a “legendary drummer,” the frontman said that the band would “probably” continue playing because it helps his family.

A camera crew from X17 caught up with Snider at Los Angeles International Airport, where he was returning home after Pero’s death required him to cut his family vacation short. In the above video, Snider made the statement upon being asked how you replace Pero, who joined the group two years before they broke big with Stay Hungry.

“You don’t,” he said. “Will we continue to play? Probably for his family, because his family will benefit from us playing, financially. [There are] five original members of Twisted Sister, and he’s the first one we’ve lost. And the band is heartbroken.”

Pero died of a heart attack at the age of 55 in his sleep while touring with Adrenaline Mob, which he joined in late 2013 (video from his last concert can be found here). He had left Twisted Sister in 1987, but returned in 1997. Snider, who will soon head to New York for the funeral, left with praise for his longtime colleague.

For generations of music fans, Las Vegas has always been seen as the place where showbiz, the antithesis of rock, reigned supreme. But the past few years have seen a shift in that way of thinking, with bands now flocking to Sin City in the form of high-profile residencies. With Journey set to become the latest group to take the plunge, it seems like a good time as any to look at the reasons for this change.

Mostly, it’s the simple passage of time that’s caused the shift. As the stars who ruled Vegas for decades aged, fresh names were required to get tourists into shows. Because the idea of the all-around entertainer no longer existed, and acts with no track record outside of Vegas were meeting with diminishing returns, it made sense for the casinos to look for other musicians with decades of success behind them as live draws.

“Much of the past stigma about Las Vegas being the place where acts go to die has faded,” says Tim Dressen, a Vegas enthusiast who, for 10 years, has hosted the popular Five Hundy by Midnight podcast. “If bands can play for fans who still love their music and make decent money doing it, the location probably doesn’t matter much. Vegas resorts are generally good at promoting live events, so tickets sell well, and the casinos booking these acts know that their fans are in their 30s, 40s and 50s. They’re likely to have some disposable income to spend not only on tickets, but on food, drinks, hotel rooms and gambling as well.”

But why travel to Vegas to see a band when it will eventually make its way to your town? Dressen — who has seen numerous concerts on his travels to Vegas over the years, including Sammy Hagar, the Scorpions and U2 – notes that it creates a different mindset when you’ve traveled cross-country for a concert rather than to have the concert come to you. And when coupled with Vegas’s singular vibrancy, it becomes a special event rather than just an ordinary night out.

“A lot of people are looking for an excuse to visit Las Vegas,” Dressen says. “And even if they’re going to Las Vegas mainly to see a band, the rest of the trip — the food, the gambling, the madness of the city — adds to the experience and makes it special.”

While those bands can play to considerably more people on a nightly basis, Dressen notes that playing Vegas residencies offers musicians a chance to perform something besides the usual greatest-hits show.

“Def Leppard did a top-to-bottom performance of Hysteria every weekend for three weeks,” Dressen says. “Fans didn’t get to see that particular show elsewhere because they didn’t tour it. There are rumors that they plan to do the same with Pyromania in 2016, so it must have worked out.” (Def Leppard and Guns N’ Roses have released DVDs of their Vegas shows, so fans who didn’t make it to one of them can now see them.)

But it’s not just the Joint that’s brought classic rock to Vegas. In 2004, Elton John began a long-term relationship with the Colosseum, an ornate theater at Caesars Palace with a capacity of just under 4,300. The partnership has so far resulted in two productions: The Red Piano, which ran for more than 240 performances between 2004-09, and two years later, The Million Dollar Piano, which John has performed more than 100 times to date. Rod Stewart also regularly plays the Colosseum, and in 2012, Carlos Santana began a residency at the House of Blues at Mandalay Bay called An Intimate Evening With Santana: Greatest Hits Live, which has been extended through 2016.

In addition to the residencies, The Beatles LOVE, a Cirque du Soleil production that makes innovative use of the group’s catalog, has been playing at the Mirage since 2006. And on any given night, classic rock bands can be found in various theaters and showrooms in properties on the Strip, off-Strip or downtown as part of their regular tours.

Watch the ‘A Day in the Life’ Sequence From ‘The Beatles LOVE’

Some rockers are even using the city as a place to launch business ventures. Vince Neil, who moved to Vegas in the mid-‘90s, has become somewhat of an impresario in town, having started several tattoo parlors, restaurants and a strip club. Last year, he followed Kiss into the world of arena football, with the Las Vegas Outlaws; the team is scheduled to begin play on March 30. As for Kiss, they realized the commercial potential of Las Vegas when they opened the Kiss by Monster Mini-Golf Course in March 2012.

In May, the first American installment of the globally successful Rock in Rio franchise will take place in a custom-built concert ground on the North Strip called the “City of Rock.” But with Metallica as the only classic-rock band in the lineup (the other headliners for the “Rock Weekend” are No Doubt, with Taylor Swift and Bruno Mars topping the bills on the “Pop Weekend”), Dressen thinks the festival will undergo some growing pains.

“The initial lineup is spotty and unfocused,” he says. “As a result, I don’t think the first event will do as well as the organizers initially hoped. In fact, they have already publicly decreased their ticket projections a couple times. They have a long history of successful festivals in Brazil, where they have little if any competition from other festivals or even major concert tours. In the U.S., they’re competing with dozens of other festivals that have figured out what the American audience wants. The Rock in Rio name isn’t going to sell tickets here, so they better put together a strong lineup that appeals to a specific audience if they want to survive.”

As a city where the primary industry is tourism, Las Vegas needs to frequently reinvent itself in order to keep people coming back as well as attract new fans. After a period in which it promoted itself as a family-friendly destination — which many experts now agree was a mistake — turning Las Vegas into a home for classic rock is going a long way toward re-establishing it as an adult playground.